Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Can't Stop the Hustle" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired April 7, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that NBC showed a Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that was a good deal better than most of them have been, if only because at least some of the characters have more dimension than usual.The title was “Can’t Knock the Hustle” and the writers, Kimberly Ann Harrison and Emmy Higgins, gave the two principal villains some compensating aspects of nobility. Preston Webb (Mykelti Williamson) is shown as an out-and-out thug who cold-bloodedly executes two of the members of the “Marcy Gang” through which he hopes to control New York City’s illegal drug trade (in a clip from a previous episode also shown at the beginning of this one, he boasts that he’s successfully driven out the Italians and the Albanians and thus his gang completely controls the business), but he also makes a donation to a local Black church to create a health clinic on the church grounds. And corrupt police detective Frank Donnelly (Denis Leary) is shown unexpectedly generous, especially to a police officer named Jessie Santos (Sebastian Arroyo) whose daughter is seriously ill with leukemia and being treated at an upstate clinic near a rehab facility (which briefly gives the members of the Organized Crime Task Force the idea that he developed a drug habit and that’s why he joined Donnelly’s outfit of corrupt cops, “The Brotherhood”).

Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni, top-billed) is assigned – or more or less assigns himself – to infiltrate “The Brotherhood.” Sensing that the only way to trap Donnelly and the other members of “The Brotherhood” is to “flip” one of them, he decides that Santos is the most likely to turn state’s evidence and joins him in an elaborate heist to steal real diamonds from a big-time jeweler at a diamond seller’s convention (who knew there were such things?) and substitute fakes of cubic zirconium, only Donnelly learns of the operation and crashes it, takes the diamonds for himself and shoots and kills the jeweler when he’s supposed to be taking the man to the airport, only the victim wants to go to the police station first and They Both Reach for the Gun. (Maurine Dallas Watkins, your plagiarism attorney thanks you for his three houses and the two memberships in Donald Trump’s golf courses.) We get the point that, despite their occasional beneficences, both Donnelly and Webb are big-time bad-asses who will stop literally at nothing to make sure their associates don’t pull any jobs (and make any money) on their own, though at least Jessie Santos only gets arrested at the end, not killed (not yet, anyway).

There’s also an ongoing plot line about Stabler losing his illusions about his father, also a New York cop, who won a fancy medal for supposedly stepping in front of a bullet to save the life of his partner but really shot himself with the dead crook’s gun to bolster the illusion and not allow it to look like they shot and killed an unarmed man. All his life Stabler has idolized his dad and patterned his own career after his old man, and now the illusions are being shattered. He asks the computer-crimes division to reopen the case involving his father, and he gets fragments of the story from his mentally ill (bipolar) mother (Ellen Burstyn), though it comes out of her in dribs and drabs. At one point she tells her son that his dad was suspended from the police force; later she insists he never was. In search of honest information about his father, Stabler seeks out Captain Donald Craigin (Dann Florek), his commanding officer during his 12 years on the Special Victims Unit, but (as nice as it was to see Florek again, and surprisingly well preserved after a decade) he really doesn’t have the answers Stabler wants to hear, one way or the other in terms of whether his dad was an honest police officer or a crook. This was a nicer Law and Order: Organized Crime than usual, and as I said what made it better than older episodes is the greater emotional complexity, especially of the villains,